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Recently, a comprehensive indigenous public policy was officially signed by the government of Colombia’s Caquetá region. The policy—drafted by seven indigenous groups with technical assistance from ACT—will, for the first time, provide a platform for the indigenous communities to have a say in Caquetá’s future.

In the past several years, the indigenous peoples of the Colombian department of Caquetá have taken enormous steps forward in asserting their rights, creating a representative body and crafting a recently ratified indigenous public policy for the region. ACT guided and assisted the communities through these processes.

The U.S. writer H.L. Mencken famously remarked, “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.” The question of how to protect the Amazon’s isolated tribes certainly falls under this principle.

Diverse tropical ecosystems like rainforests and coral reefs may harbor microorganisms able to produce compounds that -- when made less toxic, more effective or used as inspiration to develop new medicines -- may give us new antibiotics, new treatments for cancer and new treatments for stress. Western medicine, in spite of the superlative nature of its success, does have its holes.

An hour before dawn, we landed at a small airstrip deep in the mountains of the Colombian Amazon. This remote forest -- ringing with the sounds of frogs, monkeys and parrots --seemed surreal, as did my reason for visiting. Over the next five days, I would photograph the annual conference of the region's female indigenous healers.

While top-of-the-line outdoor gear and insect repellents work well in the Northern California backcountry, they're next to worthless in the Colombian jungle. This was my first lesson traveling from the West Coast to a region with 100-degree temperatures and 90 percent humidity, where bugs feed on any millimeter of exposed of skin and the humid air dissolved my malaria pills into a sludgy mess before I could take them.

Next week the Colombian government will officially double the size of its largest national park, reports El Espectador.
Chiribiquete National Park in southern Colombia will expand from 12,990 square kilometers to 27,808 square kilometers, making it one of the biggest protected areas in the Amazon. The expansion will include areas thought to be inhabited by two "uncontacted" or voluntarily isolated tribes. These areas were potentially at risk from oil exploration and mining.

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